[PROGRAMMING NOTE: I am going to start replacing words hyperlinked to Wikipedia with a hyperlinked right arrow (⇒) following the relevant phrase. This is a temporary solution to an issue with embedded link proliferation that I'll address eventually in a post, but basically I want to distinguish links included for background information from ones that refer to content that a post is "in conversation with" (for lack of a better term).]

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about what I referred to as status updating and digital publishing:

So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

Status updating is a more recent development than digital publishing. For evidence of this just compare the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Both saw plenty of blogging (both by private individuals and by professionals on behalf of publications), but only 2008 saw a huge role for realtime communications (again, and perhaps even more surprisingly, both in terms of individuals and organizations). The previous post linked to above also has some compelling numbers on this questions.

And all this realtime stuff has gotten a lot of attention, particularly from people who think about the evolution or technology and its social implications. Nick Carr⇒, for instance, started a series of blog posts called “The Realtime Chronicles” almost a year ago in which he (somewhat facetiously) announced that “Real time is realtime“:

I’m glad to see that “realtime” is officially one word now rather than two. It’s an update long overdue. That space between “real” and “time” had become an annoyance. Looking at it was like peering into a black hole of unengaged consciousness, a moment emptied of stimulus. It was more than an annoyance, actually. It was an affront to the very idea of realtime. As soon as you divide realtime into real time it ceases to be realtime. Realtime has no gaps. It’s nonstop. It runs together.[...]

Realtime is our natural state – it’s what we share with the other animals – and now at last we’re going back to it. Listen to the birds. They’ll tell you all you need to know: realtime is a stream of tweets. Yesterday, when he announced the twitterification of Facebook, the realtiming of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg said, “We are going to continue making the flow of information even faster.” The first one to remove all the spaces wins.

I think Carr may have been a bit premature, but only slightly. Realtime arrives for real when the technology is in place to make that flow Zuckerberg describes really and truly fluid. That’s finally starting to happen, though it’s still sort of around the bend for the vast majority of users.
To put it simply, realtime requires “push” information delivery to become ubiquitous and standard. What that means is well-illustrated by looking at how RSS (Really Simple Syndication⇒) usually works. Typically, an RSS feed reader will periodically “poll” the feed source to see if anything new has been added. Feed reader applications allow one to set how frequently such polling is done. It can’t check all the time because it consumes bandwidth for the client and, assuming many clients, would impose an unmanageable number of requests on the server, such that it would almost certainly crash some sites.

For example, the popular Mac RSS reader application I use, NetNewsWire, has “every 30 minutes” as its most frequent setting. That’s much too much time between updates to be really realtime. The NewNewsWire iPhone application doesn’t even poll for updates on its own, it has to be activated (something I frustratingly routinely forget to do before entering the signal-less New York subway).

Now, some might ask why one needs a desktop feed reader. Why not just go and check the actually sites? Well, that’s horribly inefficient and hardly realtime either unless one does so continuously. And it obviously doesn’t solve the problem of on-the-go blog update notification on one’s phone. Of course, a lot of people might find that an unwelcome burden, but if the realtime trend continues it’s fair to assume that it’s inevitable.

So what does an alternative approach look like? A good example is a service called Superfeedr. Superfeedr is, in the words of its own homepage:

Real-time Notification

Give Superfeedr your feed urls and new entries will be pushed to you. By combining several technologies we can notify you in less than 15 minutes (or it’s free).

No More Polling

Don’t waste your time and resources fetching old data and getting “new” data too late. Superfeedr’s parser frequency is constantly readjusted each time a feed is fetched.

15 minutes might not seem like much less than 30, but that’s just the guaranteed maximum wait. Look at the language here (even though they hyphenate real-time): The concern is wasting time and not getting new data before it’s “too late.” Yes, this is definitely the realtime imperative Carr was discussing translated into new technological infrastructure for the social Web, and it’s far from the only example.

In fact, Superfeeder combines a number of technologies and techniques for delivering these up-to-the-minute updates. One of them is the wonderfully named PubSubHubbub⇒, helpfully explained in the following presentation (it’s really very short and simple):

So hubs are used as intermediaries between publishers and subscribers to facilitate faster communication with a smaller load on the computers involved by centralizing the process of figuring out what is new when and letting concerned parties know rather than the current situation in which everyone asks everyone. A bit humorously, this is a technological displacement of they typically Web 2.0 “many-to-many” communication model in favor of something more centralized and hierarchical.

Another key technology here is XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol⇒). It’s what several instant messaging services like gChat and Jabber (where the protocol originated from in fact) are based on and also the basis for the protocol behind the much-hyped Google Wave, a totally different paragon of realtime-ness (read a pretty good anecdotal explanation of how here).

But the most invasively realtime of the technologies involved, though not actually part of Superfeedr’s infrastructure, is the iPhone’s support for push data. Specifically, this post from the Superfeedr blog explains how to hook up that service to an iPhone app called AppNotification in order to get Superfeedr’s super-quick updates pushed to one’s iPhone, thus getting immediately updated of any new feed items.

Still think that might be overkill? I really love this Tweet response to the post (which I get to see because of the DISQUS “reactions” at the bottom of the page—I told you that would be big!):

We’re really close to the perfect iPhone RSS experience… but not quite? Push notifications yes; two-way sync, no? http://bit.ly/22yHz1

Realtime social Web users can be pretty demanding.

Think about all this really realtime stuff along with the location-based social services like Foursquare (here’ s some recent Mashable hype on that) and the rapidly improving world of augmented reality⇒, and you can start to see the outlines of what the next generation of the social Web might look like. It’s one where a mobile interface with the realtime Web is sufficiently advanced that one doesn’t need to be deliberately accessing the social Web to be a well-timed participant in it, and as a result the Web more easily folds together with ongoing “offline” day-to-day activity.

Nick Carr seems to disagree that those things fit together so well. In a post tiled “Realtime kills real space” he writes:

Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen – the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.

Maybe he’s getting a little vague there, but the point is there’s already room for debate about the relationships and tensions between these relatively new social technologies. That’s an indication that they’re maturing rapidly and that there’s also room for people to take sides in these debates in a more practical way—in terms of how they deploy and leverage these tools.